This article by Catherine Deveny on the ABC called “Financial abortion: Should men be able to ‘opt out’ of parenthood?” is infuriatingly limited.

I have recently come to the conclusion that, as a feminist, I support men being able to opt out of fatherhood early in a pregnancy via what is known as a financial abortion.

I believe a woman should not be forced to become a mother any more than a man should be forced to become a father. If a man has not said, “I want to have a child with you now-ish”, it is fair to assume he doesn’t, and therefore should be able to legally withdraw from becoming a parent.

It would also be less traumatic for children, and more empowering for women.

A financial abortion (also known as a paper abortion or a statutory abort) would essentially enable men to cut all financial and emotional ties with a child in the early stages of pregnancy.

Men can ‘opt out’ already. Don’t have sex with women, get a vasectomy, take lots and lots of responsibility for contraception. Oh.. you mean not that kind of “control over reproductive choices”.

Men can have more control than they do currently over whether parenthood happens (see my paragraph above), but just like women they don’t have full control over conception. Pregnancy is not something you can ‘make happen’.. you can provide circumstances that will facilitate pregnancy or which won’t… but conception is a biological action that happens outside of women’s and men’s control. We all need to carry responsibility for that.

It is not something one can ‘opt out of’ if you, like me, happen to enjoy the act of putting sperm near eggs inside women’s bodies.

What certain men are seeking to ‘opt out of’ is not whether parenthood can occur, it is the responsibility of parenthood. How very user choice, what part of reality might possibly be missing from this?

The parent with the ability to decide to carry a pregnancy to term (or not) is the one whose body has a foetus inside it. If we lived in another reality where men could choose to carry a foetus in their body to term then they could opt out of doing so.. and I am sure many women would be content to concede that right to men.

And of course on the wider issue of opting out, as someone said on my Facebook page, is this…

“In practice men do have this choice: courts won’t demand men conform to care and contact agreements & DHSCS has a poor record of enforcing compliance with child support assessments/ agreements. Women’s access to abortion remains practically constrained and single mothers a group at high risk of poverty – these remain the bigger issues than further expanding masculine financial & paternal discretion.”

It is another common assumption that a single mother is a woman who puts her sex life ahead of her social responsibility. Manipulative or sexual, she exhibits either too much self-control or not enough (what is never mentioned in relation to teenage pregnancies is the possibility of child abuse and rape). Behind the idea of maternal virtue, therefore, another demand and/or reproach. A mother is a woman whose sexual being must be invisible. She must save the world from her desire – a further projection that allows the world to conceal from itself the unmanageable nature of all human sexuality, and its own voraciousness. Even in the years leading up to the 1960s, when there was more sympathy for the predicament of single mothers, the basic assumption was there. ‘Innocent’ girls could get into trouble and deserved understanding ‘provided that they did not flaunt their transgressions’. Nor is the childless woman immune from sexual taint. ‘Surely,’ one journalist said recently, expressing a common attitude to the declining birth rate in 21st-century France, ‘a woman who refuses to be a mother enjoys lovemaking rather too much?’

In this context, ancient Greece and Rome are again refreshing. Cleopatra, deemed the most desirable of women, was the mother of four children, one, she claimed, by Julius Caesar and the three youngest by Mark Antony, something most representations of Cleopatra conspire not to remember or talk about (no one I have mentioned this to had the faintest idea she was a mother).

Each blog has its own life cycle too. Those that came into being to chronicle a particular life arc –moving to a new place, divorce, illness – reached a natural end point as circumstances changed. Speaking to my former blogging friends about why they stopped, a number of crunch points emerge: children get older and their privacy becomes more important. Break-ups are often too raw to chronicle online. Family and neighbours discovering her blog had a radically stifling effect on what one friend felt able to write. Another, a schoolteacher, says, “I hated finding out colleagues were reading it and I hated the self-censorship it imposed. Many people simply reach the point where they aren’t comfortable with the level of exposure blogging brings – some miss it, some don’t.

I know these crunch points intimately. I have spent an excruciating afternoon cringing as the not-remotely-amused HR manager in my office read extracts of my blog back to me (pro tip: don’t describe your workplace as “the corridor of ennui”). My husband finds the blogging impulse baffling and unhealthy and we’ve clashed over it, often. Our teenage sons have no desire to serve as entertainment for my readers, so their lives are now off-limits. Neighbours sometimes comment on things they have read on my blog, which is a discomfiting experience even though rationally I know it’s inevitable when I put my personal life out in a public space. I have certainly felt queasily over-exposed at times. When I started writing, I was unhappy at work and at home, living abroad, missing family and friends. Blogging was a lifeline; a reminder that I could be funny and interesting.

From Emma Beddington of Belgian Waffling at The Pool with “Personal blogging has declined in popularity but it will never be obsolete”.

Oh yes, oh yes. The list I could write you of readers I’ve discovered over time that leave me exquisitely uncomfortable. Oh my lord.

Incidentally, I am reading Beddington’s memoir at the moment and it has sparked my interest in blogs again, so I am also re-visiting mimi smartypants. Her posts about her daughter and husband are my favourite and predictably, I recently read that she is beginning to shy away from writing about her daughter now because of her child’s privacy… just when it is getting complicated and interesting and relevant. But, of course, I understand given I have made the same decision.

I also hugely miss Yet Another Blooming Blog. Does anyone know if she still writes?

And while we are talking blogs…. lovely round of good feminist blogging here at No Awardor the Down under Feminist Carnival 102..and thank you for including some of mine.

Have you ever run with a baby? You’re up, you scoop, you leap. Bone against bone, you and the baby in your arms knock against one another. But within two of your running strides, the baby knows to fold herself into you, she tucks under your chin and presses against your chest. Two strides, heart pounding, and you both find flight.

Babies must know, somewhere primitive in them, how to be held by someone running. Because two strides and the instinct awakens, they’re suddenly weightless in your arms, moulded against you.

In the spring and summer 2016, my research assistant and I undertook a study on the representation of motherhood in four women’s studies venues: panels presented at the annual conference of the National Women’s Studies Association between 2010 and 2015; articles and books reviews in five feminist journals—Signs, Frontiers, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminist Studies, and Gender and Society—from 2005 to 2015; the table of contents of ten introduction to gender and women’s studies textbooks; and the syllabi of fifty introduction to women’s studies courses.

The breakdown of papers at the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) annual conference (appendix B) is as follows: 2015: 506 papers with 18 on motherhood; 2014 593 papers with 29 on motherhood; 2013 767 papers with 24 on motherhood; 2012 741 papers with 10 motherhood and 3 on the maternal; and 2011 757 papers with 19 on motherhood and 2 on the maternal. Overall, 105 papers were presented on motherhood from a total of 3,364 papers or less than 3 percent. More popular topics included academe (118), activism (193), transnational (235), race (216), trans and queer issues (156), and gender (70). Thus, more than twice as many papers on transnational issues were published than on motherhood and twice as many papers on race than on motherhood. And combining the topics of trans, queer, and gender studies, more than twice as many papers on gender and sexuality were published than on motherhood. Less than three percent, I would suggest, is far too low given that motherhood studies is at least as established as an academic field as transnational studies and sexuality studies, yet there were twice as many papers on these topics than there were on motherhood. Moreover, to my knowledge, there has been only one plenary panel (in 2006) on the topic of motherhood at an NWSA conference, and there has never been a motherhood scholar or a motherhood activist as the keynote speaker in the organization’s forty-year history.

Similar low percentages are found in the number of articles and book reviews on motherhood in gender and women’s studies journals (appendix C). From 1 January, 2006, to 31 December, 2016, the percentages of articles and book reviews on motherhood are as follows: for Signs, only 3 percent of their articles and book reviews were on motherhood; for Frontiers, 6 percent; for Feminist Studies, 1.6 percent; for Women’s Studies Quarterly, 4 percent; and for Gender Studies, 5 percent. In contrast, the percentages for the topic of sex-sexuality are 11 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent, 4 percent, and 11 percent, respectively, and for gender, 17 percent, 8 percent, 9 percent, 6 percent, and thirty-one percent, respectively. While the combined totals for sex-sexuality and gender are 41 and 71, respectively, the total for motherhood is 19.6. The average percentage was 3.92 percent for motherhood, 8.2 percent for sex-sexuality, and 14.2 percent for gender. Thus, there were more twice as many reviews or articles on the topic of sex-sexuality and close to four times as many reviews or articles on gender than on motherhood.

The percentage of motherhood content is even lower in introduction to gender and women’s studies textbooks (appendix D). None of the reviewed ten textbooks, published between 2001 and 2016, have a section on motherhood. This absence is particularly notable in such textbooks as the recent Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies: Introductory Concepts (2016), which has no section on motherhood but includes the chapter “The Manly Art of Pregnancy,” and Feminist Frontiers (2011), which likewise has no section on motherhood but includes the chapter “Masculinities and Globalization.” As well, Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (2001) has no chapters on motherhood but includes the chapters “On the Rag” and “Abortion, Vacuum Cleaners and the Power Within.”

Four textbooks have sections on the family but only four of the approximately twenty-five chapters in these family sections cover the topic of motherhood. The most discussed topics are heterosexuality and gender. Interestingly, there are as many chapters on fathering as there are on mothering in the family sections, even though it is mothers, not fathers, who overwhelming do the carework in families. As well, the topic of motherhood, as opposed to fatherhood, is represented and regarded as an established scholarly field with considerable research. Thus, one would expect to find more scholarship on motherhood than fatherhood in introductory textbooks.

Six of the collections have chapters on motherhood; however, all but one of the chapters was under thirteen pages in length. The page count for the above nine chapters is under one hundred pages. These nine chapters along with the four in the family sections make a total of thirteen chapters on motherhood in the introduction to women and gender studies textbooks examined. At approximately a combined page count of 150 pages of the total 5,111 pages of these books, the percentage of motherhood content in the ten introduction to gender and women’s textbooks is just under 3 percent.

An even lower percentage of motherhood content is found in the fifty introduction to women and gender studies course syllabi examined. Ten of the fifty courses include at least one reading on the topic of motherhood (Appendix E). The initial count of ten suggests a percentage of 20 percent. However, the perspective of many of these courses is that of reproductive rights and justice. One course includes two readings on childbirth from a reproductive rights perspective. Interestingly, in three of the courses in which motherhood is examined, the subject of the reading is lesbian or black motherhood. Only one of the ten courses has a full unit on motherhood in which motherhood is examined from more than a single perspective and from more than a reproductive rights paradigm. But interestingly, this unit includes an interview with Rebecca Walker, a feminist writer well-known for her mother-blame perspective. In addition to the ten courses that have at least one reading on motherhood, two of the courses have readings on the family. However the themes of the one course are “Gender and the Family”, “Family Systems, Family Lives” and “Marriage and Love.” While with the second they are “Families: World’s Toughest Job, and “Why Women Can’t Have it All.” In total, these fifty course syllabi contain hundreds of readings, but I would argue that less than ten of these are specifically on the topic of motherhood and from a mother-centred perspective; that is roughly a percentage of less than 1 percent.

The percentages of motherhood content in women studies conferences, journals, textbooks. and syllabi range from under 1 percent to just under 4 percent. Given that 80 percent of women become mothers in their lifetime, there is an evident disconnect between the minimal representation of motherhood in academic feminism and the actual lives of most women. Indeed, as Eva Feder Kitty emphasizes, most women care for their dependents at some point, and for many women, “this occupies the better part of their lives” (qtd. in Stephens 141). Moreover, these low percentages do not reflect or capture the considerable and significant research done on motherhood over the last twenty years.

At two in the morning, Ted, sleeping in the spare room, has a bad dream and creeps into my bed. He flings himself about diagonally for the rest of the night, cramming me into a tiny corner. God damn it, I think at 5 a.m., this is worse than being married.

From the section titled “While not writing a book” in Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner.